Category Archives: words

At Rama IX Park, which I went to this morning and which is less centrally located than the probably better-known Lumpini Park, but which I think I like better because it feels more secluded — like you can actually kind of feel like you’re out of the city, and when you look off into the distance you don’t see a glass wall of skyscraper standing sentinel at the park’s edge —continued…

Late last year: In a last-minute add-on to my trip, I decided that instead of going straight back to Bangkok, I’d take a detour to Lamphun, a small city in the north that was the former capital of the ancient, pre-Thai Haripunchai empire (how mysterious!).continued…

And I thought I was being such the wit when last year I ended a post about a giant beehive with two photos placed side by side, both close-ups and all texture and pattern: one of the beehive, the other of a large Bangkok apartment building. Sometimes it’s funnier to imply something pictorially — like, wouldn’t two pictures be worth 2000 words? — than to just state it baldly.

I’ve really liked its theme song ever since I saw 1999’s เจ้าสาวปริศนา (jaosao prisana) last year, but the only copy of it I’ve been able to find is this low-fi fragment played over the show’s opening credits:

In my experience with learning a language on its own terms, from the inside — in other words, not going through other languages (i.e., not getting translations or explanations in English1), and a lot of the time not even asking what words mean, but just letting their sounds and meanings crystallize in my consciousness of their own accord — I think the acquisition process happens largely on its own timetable. The points at which I’ll start noticing a word, at which the sounds of the word become clear enough to discern, or when the meaning or use of the word comes into focus, don’t seem to be things I can predict or control, though I believe that continually getting more input is what keeps the process going forward.continued…